Thursday, May 19, 2016

Tis the season for pomp, circumstance and politics -- May 19, 2016 column

By MARSHA
MERCER

President
Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot, but he is on the campaign trail. His harshest
attack yet on Donald J. Trump previewed the president’s role in the fall
campaign.

“In politics
and in life, ignorance is not a virtue,” Obama said May 15 in his commencement
address at Rutgers University. “It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking
about. That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not
challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking
about.”

The partisan
campaign pitch by a president is unusual – what isn’t this election cycle? --
but Obama isn’t the first to take center stage at graduation exercises and
throw down a political or policy gauntlet.

As war raged
in Europe in 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a commencement address
at the University of Virginia, where his son, Franklin Jr., was graduating from
the law school, to warn the United States could no longer be “a lone island in
a world dominated by the philosophy of force.”

Italy had
declared war on France and Great Britain just that morning, and FDR said:

“On
this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into
the back of its neighbor.

“On this
tenth day of June 1940, in this university founded by the first great American
teacher of democracy, we send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond
the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valor their battle for freedom,”
he said.

The speech,
received with cheers and rebel yells in Charlottesville, presaged the United
States’ eventual entry into World War II. With the election only months away
and Roosevelt was running for a third term, though, some Democrats worried FDR
would alienate voters.

In a
commencement address at the University of Michigan in May 1964, President
Lyndon B. Johnson set the theme for his presidential campaign and his domestic
agenda when he outlined his goals for a Great Society. His ambitious plan called for no less than rebuilding cities, cleaning
up the environment and transforming education.

Twenty-seven
years later, President George H. W. Bush chose commencement in Ann Arbor to open
his reelection bid, saying Johnson’s social agenda had not only failed but backfired.

“Programs designed to ensure racial harmony generated
animosity. Programs intended to help people out of poverty invited dependency,”
Bush said in May 1991.

“We don’t
need another Great Society with huge and ambitious programs administered by the
incumbent few. We need a Good Society built upon the deeds of the many, a
society that promotes service, selflessness and action,” Bush said.

Obama renewed
the debate about the scope of government and the level of political discourse in
a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 2011.

“What
troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad,”
he said.

“We’ve got
politicians calling each other all sorts of unflattering names. Pundits and
talking heads shout at each other. The media tends to play up every hint of
conflict because it makes for a sexier story – which means anyone interested in
getting coverage feels compelled to make their arguments as outrageous and as
incendiary as possible,” Obama said.

Trash-talking
about government has only gotten worse, and Trump’s candidacy five years later makes
Obama seem prescient. Trumpians endorse the isolationist tendencies FDR rued so
long ago.

In his
Rutgers speech, Obama said, “If the past two decades have taught us anything,
it’s that the biggest challenges we face cannot be solved in isolation.”

He scorned
the ideas of building a wall to keep out Mexicans and banning Muslims from
entering the country as “not just a betrayal of our values” but as actions that
“would alienate the very communities at home and abroad who are our most
important partners in the fight against violent extremism.”

In reply, Trump
typically fired a quick, personal hit.

“`In
politics, and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.’ This is a primary reason
that President Obama is the worst president in U.S. history,” he tweeted.

Obama will
have many chances over the next six months to use the bully pulpit to assail
Trump. His final commencement address as president is June 2 at the U.S. Air
Force Academy, where he likely will focus on the United States’ role in the
world.